Sonic And ICE Team To Accelerate MPEG-2 Transcoding

Sonicís ICEíd DVD Transcoder To Arrive On BlueIce And Ultra BlueIce Hardware

15-Apr-00

Sonic Solutions announced at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention (NAB) a technology partnership with ICE, the leader in accelerated digital video solutions for the desktop, to accelerate, or ""ICE"", Sonicís industry-leading MPEG-2 transcoding technology for DVD publishing. The Sonic-ICE product will make fast, high-quality MPEG-2 video transcoding a standard feature on ICEís Basic BlueICE and Ultra BlueICE cards that power ICEís entire line of hardware/software solutions. ""We are excited to offer Sonicís high-end DVD transcoder as an integral part of the ICE family of solutions,"" said Fady Lamaa, Director of Product Marketing at ICE. ""By applying ICEís hardware/software acceleration technology to Sonicís high-quality software encoder, we dramatically speed the conversion of video content to MPEG-2 for DVD, enabling thousands of ICE users to publish their video content on DVD."" ICEíd MPEG-2 transcoding will integrate seamlessly with Sonic DVD Fusion for Avid and Media 100 users, as well as Sonic DVDit!. The Sonic-ICE collaboration means significantly faster MPEG-2 transcoding and a competitive edge in meeting the surging demand for publishing video, presentations, training materials and other multimedia content on DVD. The ICEíd MPEG-2 encoder will be provided to ICE customers as an affordable upgrade, further leveraging their ICE investment for publishing their work to DVD titles. ICEís BlueICE and UltraBlueICEñbased solutions speed computationally-intensive desktop digital video applications such as compositing, editing, special effect creation, video compression and distribution. By placing Sonicís MPEG-2 encoder ëOn ICE,í Sonic and ICE offload the computationally-intensive steps of MPEG-2 transcoding from the host CPU to ICEís award-winning solution. Sonic DVDit! and Sonic DVD Fusion users who own Basic BlueICE or Ultra BlueICE hardware will be able to take advantage of the new improved transcoding speed using the ICE board without changing their production workflow. ""As DVD publishing becomes more affordable, more video professionals will encode high-quality MPEG-2 for DVD distribution,"" said Mark Ely, Director of Product Marketing at Sonic Solutions. ""Weíre eager to work with ICE to speed the MPEG-2 transcoding process and enable ICE customers to publish their video content on DVD."" About ICE Founded in 1994 and based in Waltham, Massachusetts, Integrated Computing Engines (ICE) is a leader in accelerated digital video solutions for desktop video capture, special effects, finishing and distribution and is used extensively by professional producers of video, film, Web graphics, DVDs, CD-ROMs, and other moving images. The ICE hardware/software architecture easily integrates into standard MacÆOS and WindowsÆ NT platforms, turning desktops into affordable super-fast systems. ICE is privately held and has strategic relationships with SCP Private Equity Partners L.P., Citicorp, and Compaq Computer Corporation. About Sonic SolutionsBased in Marin County, California, Sonic (http://www.sonic.com) is the leading manufacturer of solutions for DVD publishing and interactive, streaming video on the Internet. Sonic DVDit! (http://www.dvdit.com) is the first application for DVD authoring targeted at consumers and corporate video producers, and is bundled with major video editing, capture, encoding and media production systems. Streaming DVD is the first interactive technology based on DVD for content distribution over the Internet. Sonic DVD Creator and DVD Fusion are the most widely-used systems for professional DVD publishing, and are installed worldwide at major studios, post production facilities and in corporate marketing departments. SonicStudio HD is the leading digital workstation for preparing audio for release on CD and the first for creating content for the new DVD-Audio format. Sonic is also a full voting member of the DVD Forum, the standards-setting body for the DVD format.

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